Chris Hughes says Facebook is now experiencing ‘a kind of reckoning’VINCENT TULLO/NEW YORK TIMES

A hundred camera lenses were trained on Mark Zuckerberg as he testified to the US Congress last week, all searching for clues as to what might be going on in the mind of one of America’s richest men. Sitting opposite me in a Mayfair hotel is one of the people who knows him best.

Chris Hughes was there when it all began. Zuckerberg’s Harvard room-mate, the only non-techie among Facebook’s founders, was nicknamed “the Empath” by the man behind the world’s biggest social network. Hughes describes last week’s congressional hearing as “a come-to-Jesus moment”, not just for his friend, but for the company and “a lot of people in the tech space”.

For Zuckerberg “there was always an idealism infused in the Facebook project”, he…

Want to read more?

Subscribe now and get unlimited digital access on web and our smartphone and tablet apps, free for your first month.